All tagged PR
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As I eluded to in an earlier post today, the PR, advertising and marketing business has converged. Each segment is doing social media. Each segment is trying to do parts of other segments, i.e. PR agencies doing traditional marketing work, while advertisers are conducting PR exercises like messaging training.
It's a confusing, yet exciting time to be in this business considering where the job market is in relation to the industry.
Two elements I've enjoyed of my career has been the writing and communication aspects, i.e. telling stories. And, if you think about this industry in terms of the responsibilities, a lot of what we do is rooted in story-telling.
We create campaigns that tell the story of a brand. We create messaging that clearly communicates the value proposition of a company or non-profit. We develop personas that help bring brands to life online.
These are all elements of story telling, but there are more. Here are more:
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I've been in the journalism/PR/digital marketing business for 18 years (in that order). If you've ever worked at an agency, you know that the lines between PR, advertising and marketing has become blurred because of online communications, i.e. social media.
The space is become very crowded. Guru's are a plenty. Books are being written at a feverish pace; books on Google+, Facebook, social media in general, location-based stuff, etc.
It's never ending and to be brutally honest, it's tiring.
Here's what I'd like to see from PR, advertising and marketers in 2012:
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My buddy Ed Cafasso has a great post over at his blog called Bending Light. He does a weekend roundup of items he finds interesting and one of them in today's issue includes using the words "content creation" on your resume. Basically he's saying there's no shame in doing so:
When I was a freshman at Northeastern University, I didn't have a clue as to what I wanted to do career wise. I thought about going into business and being an entrepreneur. Then I came face to face with accounting and decided that business wasn't for me. The only aspect that stuck with me was being creative, marketing and writing.
After a convo with my counselor, he convinced me to give journalism a shot. At that point, I was headed to co-op (cooperative education where you get real-world experience). My first "class" in journalism was in the middle of the Boston Globe newsroom. Four years later, I stuck with the Globe and was on staff for a period of time after school as a contributing writer. The experience was incredible and really set the tone for the rest of my career (you can read the gory details here).
Back in 2007, I was lucky enough to get hired by a former colleague of mine who was leading the Boston office of Manning Selvage and Lee (now known as the MSLGROUP). I was hired as a vice president and with the explosion of social media, became the director of Digital Communications for the office.
Writing is not an easy thing to do. Even when you think you are a decent writer, you pick up the New York Times or the Harvard Business Review, flip through a few pages and find yourself reaching for the dictionary or Googling a phrase.
Yes, I think I can put words together that make sense, but I am far from New York Times or HBR material.
However, reading these and other publications help not only to improve your writing, but also helps to soak up knowledge of business markets you'd never thought you'd want to know about.
Being that I've been in the news business for about 15 plus years now -- some as a reporter, some as a PR guy for two educational institutions pitching stories and the rest in the agency world developing media strategies -- I always get a kick out of pieces that make fun of the news business.
The industry is not the same as it used to be. However, the way stories are created and how news is developed, reported and delivered (to a certain extend) is pretty much the same.
All the games that PR people and journalists play with each other and against each other still play. If you've ever watched the evening news, especially the national news casts, the pieces always go something like this:
I was going to write a post about Ted Kennedy, his passing and the impact it'll have on the media over the next few days and months. But my boss beat me to it with a great post about Ted's communications legacy. It's a great round up for any brand, leader or porofessional (anyone for that matter) who wants to be seen by their peers as a trusted resource. The key to any communications program -- no matter what you're selling or who you're selling it to -- is trust.
Here's the Ted Kennedy, communications "to-do" list: